Share this article

Commuters in Paris faced rail chaos on Wednesday morning after a signal failure at Saint-Lazare train station was compounded by a broken rail on the RER A line that led to traffic being suspended.

Gare Saint-Lazare, which normally sees nearly 450,000 passengers pass through it every day, came to a grinding halt on Wednesday morning as technicians did their best to fix the signal failure.

"This is a big glitch," a spokesman for France's national rail company SNCF told AFP. The technical teams have been hard at work since 2.30 am "to carry out the necessary checks and repairs".

SNCF has asked passengers of the L, J, Intercités and TER Normand lines to postpone their journeys.

Problems for commuters were compounded when a broken rail led to RER A - the busiest commuter line in Europe - led to traffic being suspended between Auber in central Paris and the business district of La Defense.

And RER C trains were also suspended between Bretigny and Dourdan after a train hit a tree that had fallen on the line.

After the signal failure at Gare Saint-Lazare temporary stations were created at La Défense, Houilles Carrieres-sur-Seine, La Garenne-Colombes and Argenteuil.

Customers planning to travel are advised to consult the SNCF mobile app and the Transilien.com website. SNCF announced at around 10.4 that the souce o the signal failure had been found and that rail services would begin running again progressively.

Naturally it didn't take people long to start responding to the chaos on Twitter.

One user tweeted: "'Postpone your journeys...' SNCF thinks that people who are at Gare Saint-Lazare at 8 am are going on a picnic, hiking or to the beach..."